Ezra Furman & The Harpoons: Banging Down the Doors

By singer/songwriter Ezra Furman‘s third or fourth album, comparisons to Bob Dylan and Violent Femmes probably will cease. Until then, he’s stuck with them. It’s a shame because his debut album with accompanists The Harpoons doesn’t ape Dylan’s influences as often as it cites them.

“American Highway” revives Dylan’s convention of several verses and no chorus. “Mother’s Day” shares its sordid subject matter and hyper-shuffle backbeat with any number of compositions by Femmes singer/guitarist Gordon Gano, but Furman is unique despite his influences and rarely shifting vocal cadence.

What he does share with his idols is an awareness of being an outcast, and as such, he poeticizes the dreary and enlivens the depressing as outcasts are so adept at doing. It’s an awareness that he often plays up, but it’s more moving than pitiful or self-loathing.

The masterpiece on Banging Down The Doors is “How Long Diana,” a song about falling in love too easily and recoiling — a story in which a girl’s eyes are like flooded basements, and a guy’s hands tremble when he reads the girl’s letters.

“God Is A Middle-Aged Woman” is a Lou Reed-style slow burner until his horrifying screams of “Oh, God!” make the song’s simplest lyric its most desperate. One of the year’s best folk discs, Banging Down The Doors could become the same kind of sleeper classic as the first Femmes album.

– Mike McGovern
Ezra Furman & The Harpoons (Minty Fresh)